“But-but my soul, you said…you said —”
He pressed his hand over my mouth. “Shh, shh, stop. Stop.” His hand was shaking. His claws were pressing into my cheek, little pinpricks of pain. “Don’t you fucking doubt that I’ll have your soul. I’m not letting you get away. I’m not letting anything” — he grasped me so hard, so tight, that I could hardly breathe, his heat rushing over me in waves — “anything take you from me. I’ll rip Heaven and Hell and this goddamn Earth apart before I let them steal you from me.”
He’d claimed I was his before but always with the caveat that my soul was a requirement. Now? It was as if the very idea that I might be taken was repulsive, insulting. Maybe that should have scared me too, but the ache in my chest calmed, even with my heart still pounding. For a few seconds, the only sound between us was our breathing: hard, heavy.
No oxygen in the world was enough when this fear, this longing, this inevitable desire wanted to steal every breath from my lungs.
Slowly, Leon uncovered my mouth, but he still gripped my cheeks between his fingers. He held his head high, his jaw locked. “Not a goddamn thing is taking you from me, baby girl. No man, and no God. I’ll kill them all.”
Snap.
I nearly got whiplash from how quickly he wrenched me back, his body between me and whatever had just taken a step in the darkness. For the first time, I noticed how silent the woods were. How oppressively empty they seemed. No crickets, no rustling of the little creatures moving through the underbrush. Even the wind was still.
But there was a smell. Like a damp cellar. Like mold.
A figure — tall, lean, pale as bone, stood about a hundred yards away among the trees. I might have thought it was the trunk of a broken aspen at first glance. But another second meant seeing the white antlers on its head, tendrils of seaweed clinging to their prongs — the long, knobby limbs — the hooves on its too-long bent-backward legs.
The eyes.
Large milky white eyes, staring.
“Leon.” My voice shook. My hands were knotted into fists against his shirt. Slowly, careful not to make any sudden moves, he pulled the mask from his face and dropped it to the ground.
When the mask dropped, the creature jolted; it moved — rapidly like still frames of a photo, jerking, unnatural — every motion accompanied by a click as if its bones were popping.
In the blink of an eye, it was fifty yards closer.
“What the fuck is it?” I whispered, panic tightening my throat.
“A Gollum,” he said. His hand was frozen, outstretched where he’d dropped the mask, as if he didn’t dare move it again. “A creature of rotten earth. They serve the God. Its will is their will, they’re an extension of Its influence. Listen to me. Carefully.” His head twitched in my direction and the Gollum twitched, too. Then it was utterly still, save for a slight twitching in its long, boney fingers. “When I move, pull out the knife. Keep it ready.”
My hands felt too cold, too numb, to do anything with that goddamn knife. “Can you kill it?”
He tweaked his eyebrow up, glancing back at me, a smirk on his mouth. “For you, baby girl, I can kill anything.”
The Gollum lurched forward, and Leon met it before it could cross even half the distance that remained between us. In the dark, the only way I could track their movements was by the sudden flashes of the Gollum’s pale white form. The sound was like thunder, like columns of wood smacking together. The Gollum was shrieking, terrible screams that echoed through the woods, but it wasn’t going down. It just kept fighting, matching Leon’s strength and speed.
I tugged the knife from under my sweater, holding it in front of me as I backed away, until I was pressed against trunk of a pine. My heart pounded in my ears, adrenaline demanding I run while the little sense I still had in my brain anchored me to the spot. I’d seen these things before. I knew there was more than one. If this one was here…
Then where were the others?
There was a massive crack, and Leon hurled a long tree limb like a baseball bat, striking the Gollum so hard that its body crumpled like a spider. But it was only for a moment. The creature jolted up again, clicking as it did, and its twitchy head fixated in my direction.
It opened its mouth, a horrid groaning gurgle spewing out of it as it jolted rapidly toward me.
Leon seized its arm and ripped it back. The Gollum slashed at him before leaping onto his back, wrapping its long limbs around him and squeezing. Leon ripped at it with his claws, his teeth, thrashing himself backward to slam the monster against any surface he could find. He ripped into its arm and blood sprayed across my sweater, or at least, I thought it was blood at first. As it dripped down my shirt, and I touched it in horror, I realized it felt like thick mud.